My book, Ad Infinitum,has been for sale on Amazon.com since January 30th and since then my Amazon sales rank has fluctuated from a high of 450,000 to a low of 77,000. Not surprisingly, my blood pressure and heart rate have been tracking right along beside these peaks and valleys, but what really does an Amazon sales rank measure?

According to my research, my sales rank numbers are based on an algorithm that Sheldon Cooper would find challenging and said algorithm is as closely guarded by Amazon as the gold in Fort Knox making it nearly impossible to gauge with any accuracy how many actual sales the ranking numbers represent. It could be twenty; it could be five.

Amazon considers the genre, the traffic to the Amazon page where the book is listed for sale, the total number of books available for sale in your genre and the entire Amazon web site, how many fingers you have on your hand and whether or not you mumbled the right incantation while swinging a dead cat over your head in a graveyard at midnight. The result is thousands of authors hovering like vultures near their computers, constantly refreshing the page in order to see where in the vast Amazonian jungle their book rests on an hourly basis. I know that this happens. I am living proof.

Right now my Amazon rank is 222,000...if you need me, I'll be in the jungle.